Graduate Student/Post-Doc Committee Column
Allison Tackman and Kai Horstmann
The University of Arizona; Humboldt University
Greetings ARP Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Members:
First, we'd like to introduce our new representative, Kai Horstmann!
Thank you for electing me as your graduate student representative! I am currently a Ph.D. student at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany, supervised by Matthias Ziegler. My main research interest is the person-situation interaction and the conceptualization and measurement of situations. I am also involved in a project with John Rauthmann investigating the assessment of people who behave morally exceptional.
Further, I am a strong supporter of open science. I think that open science really does not mean more than doing science as it was intended to be. Yet, as a graduate student, I also understand that the new requirements may give students an additional task to fulfil. Some of our undergraduate training may not yet involve sections on open science, replicability, or related topics - and some new suggestions or guidelines are so controversial1, that a graduate student, including myself, cannot decide on his or her own how to proceed. Further, supervisors or a pressure to publish and advance on (or towards) the job-market may put graduate students in a tight corner.
As a German Ph.D. student, I have to acknowledge that I do not know all the specifics and detailed tasks of a five-year Ph.D. in the US. However, this also gives me a new perspective and allows me to contribute to ARP perspectives that may not have been present before. I very much agree with Daniel Laken's statement "Science is a collaborative effort" and would therefore like to support all collaborations possible.
A good place for setting up collaborations or discuss issues regarding open science will be the biannual ARP meeting and the mentoring lunch, which will take place at the next ARP conference. The mentor lunch at the biennial ARP conference provides graduate students and post-docs with the opportunity to interact with one of many faculty members and network with other graduate students and post-docs during the lunch hour on the Saturday of the conference. For the last conference, we doubled the number of mentors (8 total), which enabled us to accommodate over 90% of graduate students and post-docs who signed up for the lunch (64 total). A popular change to this past year's mentor lunch was the addition of three career (academic and non-academic) themed mentor tables: research-focused university, teaching-focused university, and industry or government jobs. Moving forward, we plan to introduce additional themed mentor tables (e.g., pre-registration, statistics training, etc.) based on your interests, so please look for a survey from us in early 2019! We also want to increase the number of mentors participating in this event so that we can decrease our student to mentor ratio (the traditional 8-9 students per mentor may be a bit much!). We hope everyone who participated in the mentor lunch at the 2017 conference enjoyed and benefited from it, and please do not hesitate to email us with any questions about the next mentor lunch or the ARP conference in general.
Kai Horstmann ( horstmak@cms.hu-berlin.de) & Allison Tackman ( tackman@email.arizona.edu)
1If you don't know what I am hinting at, the name of this newsletter could give you a clue.